McCain gets aggressive with Obama

NY Times:

Senator John McCain and his campaign sharply stepped up criticism of Senator Barack Obama on Tuesday as a craven and naïve traveler to the Middle East who, as Mr. McCain put it at a raucous town-hall-style meeting here, “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.”

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, vigorously condemned Mr. Obama for refusing to say, even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that security in Iraq had improved, that the surge in United States troop strength he opposed during the primaries had worked.

“He was wrong then, he is wrong now, and he still fails to acknowledge that the surge has succeeded,” Mr. McCain said. “Remarkable.”

Mr. McCain’s advisers, who are seething about the extensive news coverage of Mr. Obama’s trip, went further in a conference call on Tuesday when Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy aide, sarcastically asked if Mr. Obama’s foreign policy credentials were based on his attendance at a junior high school in Indonesia or a trip he took to Pakistan during spring break in college. Mr. Scheunemann added that Mr. Obama “seems to forget that we have elections in this country, not coronations.”

But at the public forum at the Opera House here, Mr. McCain also displayed the bumpy and sometimes hapless nature of his own effort to prove that he is the candidate with the sterling foreign policy credentials. While he calmly fielded angry questions about his Iraq policy from a member of the audience — and invited her twice to follow up as the audience booed her — he also referred, for the third time this month, to Czechoslovakia, a country that has not existed since 1993 when it was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

This time Mr. McCain caught himself, although he was a few seconds too late.

“I’m very concerned about Russia,” he told an overwhelmingly friendly crowd. “I’m very concerned that just recently, because the Czechs agreed with us on a missile defense system, that they cut the gas supplies, the oil supplies, to the Republic of Czechoslovakia — excuse me, the Czech Republic.”

Mr. McCain then added: “The Czech Republic is a very staunch ally and friend. And as you know, the Czech Republic and Slovakia split years ago and from time to time some of us misstate and say Czechoslovakia, when the fact is, it’s the Czech Republic.”

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I do not recall the Times even reporting on Obama's slips such as campaigning in 57 states and his more recent suggestion that he might be in office 10 years. To me both of those statements are far worse than making a mistake about the breakup of Czechoslovakia. It would be interesting to hear Bumiller explain why there is a different treatment for these slips of the tongue.

But the more important aspect of the story is the attacks on Obama over his stand on Iraq. If reporters really dug into this issue Obama would be significantly exposed. His answer to Katie Curic about his continued opposition to the surge was more revealing and arrogant than he realized. He tried to suggest that if we had followed his policy we could still have had the reconciliation in Iraq that is currently talking place. But at the time he made his pullout proposal he said he was willing to accept genocide as teh price of the pullout which suggest he nad little expectation taht pulling out would force reconciliation.